Category: Accountability

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Accountability too much government

Federal Self-Service

DOGE, corruption, spending, waste, fraud

Even government agencies that perform an identifiable function should be eliminated if they are not performing a proper function of government.

But what about an agency that exists primarily “to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees”?

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service is one of the agencies getting the ax under the Trump administration, at least until some judge tries to resurrect it.

Nominally, FMCS existed to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. But aside from doling out grants to unions and applicants with a tenuous connection to unions, its overriding purpose was to enable employees to splurge on themselves at the expense of taxpayers.

That’s what Luke Rosiak discovered during a year-long investigation.

One FMCS official pretended to take a years-long “business trip” so that taxpayers would foot the bill for his living expenses.

Employees unblocked government credit cards to circumvent protections against abuse, then used them to fund personal expenses. One leased a BMW with the card.

Junkets to resort locations supposedly to drum up interest in the pointless agency were really just a way of enjoying government-funded vacations.

One employee told Rosiak: “Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”

Yes, we can.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies

Robot Signatures Rule!

Joe BIden, autopen

“I’ve got a pen,” said Barack Obama, famously, “and I’ve got a phone; and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward. . . .”

There has been a lot of talk, recently, about the danger posed by Donald J. Trump’s executive orders. Understandable, but no matter how dangerous an imperial president may be, the one thing you cannot say about the “use of the pen to sign executive orders” is that it is unprecedented.

But there’s one kind of pen that is somewhat . . . problematic: the autopen.

It’s a signing machine.

The first was called the “polygraph,” invented by John Isaac Hawkins in 1803; President Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic user.

Today’s autopen is much advanced. Regular people probably use something like it to file their taxes, or use it regularly on legal documents in PDF form, but the presidential autopen is more secure. Or is supposed to be.

In 2005, the Bush legal team decided it was hunky dory to use an autopen to “sign” documents when the president is out of the country. What matters, the lawyers reasoned, was presidential intent.

Since then, all three presidents have used an autopen. 

But Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., used it to sign nearly everything. 

Or so alleges The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “The organization’s assertion points to a pattern whereby all documents featuring Biden’s signature, except for the one announcing his withdrawal from the presidential race last year, utilized the autopen,” reports Christina Davie. “These claims raise questions about presidential authenticity and executive authority.”

As that Bush era report makes clear, it’s presidential intent that matters. And in the case of the 46th president, we know that he did not remember ever signing at least a few of his executive orders.

As the Oversight Project makes clear in its report title, “Whoever Controlled the Autopen Controlled the Presidency.” I wonder, was it Jill Biden? Or one of the named triumvirate of Biden cronies?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Fire or Promote the Best?

DOGE, government waste, corruption, spending, debt

Things looked bad recently for Leland Dudek, an employee of the Social Security Administration.

Dudek almost got fired for helping the DOGE team understand how SSA’s systems work so that DOGE could zero in on wasteful or fraudulent payments.

On social media, Dudek wrote: “At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation. They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE . . .

“I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. . . . I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. . . . I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

An investigation? Administrative leave? For helping, as an executive-branch employee, the head of the executive branch to find and extirpate waste and fraud? SSA managers may have been confused about whether Donald Trump really is the president.

The suspense didn’t last long.

Dudek was not fired. Instead, the SSA commissioner was fired and Dudek became acting commissioner. 

“There are many good civil servants,” says Senator Mike Lee, “who have been quietly frustrated for years with politically motivated mismanagement [and] who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems with their agencies. Put them in charge, hand them scalpels and flamethrowers.”

Could we have at long last found the cure for dimwitted obstructionism? A certain reality TV star had words for it: “You’re fired!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability deficits and debt general freedom meme

Millionaires

meme, budget, debt, millionaires

The rich…

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Accountability education and schooling

Skill-Free Teachers

education, testing, public

The new non-requirement for becoming a teacher in New Jersey — pushed by the teacher’s union there — reminds me of some of my own classroom experiences as a kid.

Applicants no longer need to pass a test that asks basic questions about English and math and other subjects in order to get the job. Why not? Because formal confirmation of basic skills is an obstacle. New Jersey needs more teachers. Remove obstacle, get more teachers. Simple addition.

Schools have other ways to determine whether applicants have the basic skills they need in order to teach those skills. But the reason for scrapping the test is evidently to ensure that deficiency in these skills, as such, won’t prevent you from being hired.

My alternative plan: accelerate free-market reforms of education, school choice, so we don’t have to “rely on” illiterate, innumerate, government-foisted “teachers.”

In 1983, when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he instituted a competency test that, according to a 1985 Washington Post story, ten percent of the state’s public school teachers flunked. More than one-third of teachers in the state’s worst county failed this basic test.

One reason that poor and minority communities had such poor outcomes was that many of their teachers were illiterate and couldn’t do math. If you asked my fifth-grade math teacher, a product of that system, what is the sum of two plus two, she’d have had to look it up.

I survived. I now know that two plus two make eleventy. But I would not want any of today’s students to undergo the same so-called instruction.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability First Amendment rights national politics & policies too much government

GEC Bullet Ducked?

censorship

Last month, a mega-monstrous “continuing resolution” (CR) — allowing federal deficit spending over the set debt limit — was killed by public outcry, helped along by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others with megaphones or MAGAphones.

This CR was chucked to the great annoyance of champions of runaway spending and runaway violations of individual rights. They babbled about the autocratic interference of one “President Musk.” 

As if his complaints alone would have sufficed to kill it had nobody else in America cared.

The mega-monstrous CR was replaced by a mini-monstrous CR. The replacement sported many fewer pages, things like a pay raise for congressmen having been left out.

Also deleted? A part of the State Department devoted to censoring Americans.

Called the Global Engagement Center (GEC), it was designed to use indirect methods to censor Americans guilty of wrongthink. The plan was to give our tax dollars to creators of blacklists, like $100,000 to the Global Disinformation Index. American advertisers then would feel compelled to avoid dealing with listed companies — to remain on the good side of the U.S. government

Thanks to “President Musk” and his “obedient slave” Donald Trump, the GEC died. State’s website now says so itself.

Or did it? Has the GEC simply been rebranded?

The new thing is a so-called Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub; it looks like State will still be funding this GEC clone. 

The GEC, after all, was also supposed to focus only on foreign agitprop.

When will government agencies stop trying these kinds of anti-democratic, anti-constitutional end runs? 

Never. Not voluntarily.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment media and media people national politics & policies

Pardon Me

Dr. Fauci, Anthony Fauci, covid, pardons, Biden, justice

Another round of presidential pardons, anyone?

At Medium, former New York Times science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., urges President Joe Biden to “preemptively pardon Jack Smith, Robert Mueller, Merrick Garland, Brad Raffensberger, Fani Willis, Letitia James, E. Jean Carroll, Judge Juan Merchan and every judge who has ever issued a ruling that made Donald J. Trump unhappy.”

He says that “President Biden should also pardon himself,” along with “the heads of Operation Warp Speed and the chief executives of Pfizer and Moderna,” and “can’t even imagine how many political journalists . . . also need protecting.”

Is there anyone left?

“While we’re at it,” writes McNeil, “I’d like a pardon too.”

The award-winning journalist had a colorful history at The Times. In 2020, the paper reprimanded him for comments attacking Trump and the head of the Centers for Disease Control over their COVID response, declaring “that his job is to report the facts and not to offer his own opinions.”* 

And we can’t forget the primary focus of McNeil’s essay, titled: “Now Biden Should Pardon Tony Fauci.” Declaring “Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong,” the reporter decries that “a motivated prosecutor can go after you for anything . . . can break you financially with legal fees just proving your innocence.”

Yes, we know . . . having watched it unfold against Mr. Trump.

McNeil clearly fears that Trump will become a dictator, throwing out the Constitution and the rule of law. Judging from Trump’s first term, I am not so worried. But does even McNeil really believe these pardons could survive his imagined MAGA maelstrom? 

For nearly 40 years, Anthony Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, with primary responsibility for the treatment of contagious illnesses, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. A presidential pardon would be an official admission of his guilt. 

In your own vernacular, Mr. Biden: Don’t! 

Fauci deserves his day in court. And so do we. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Then, in early 2021, McNeil resigned from the newspaper “under pressure” after complaints surfaced about him using the n-word on a student trip to Peru, for which he served as a guide.

Note: Back in 2022, Elon Musk did post on X: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

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Accountability government transparency national politics & policies

Droning On

Mayorkas, Homeland Security, Lex Luthor

“There’s no question that people are seeing drones,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said yesterday on ABC’s This Week, acknowledging the obvious.

“We know of no foreign involvement with respect to the sightings in the Northeast,” the Secretary assured the public, “and we are vigilant in investigating this matter.” 

That means: He doesn’t know or he’s lying. But he pinky swears to apply the same vigilance to the Mystery Drone question that he demonstrated in managing the border these last four years.

Plus, Mayorkas promised, without even cracking a smile, to let us know right away if anything changes and it turns out these things humming over our heads are part of, say, an alien invasion. Or anything. Sorta don’t call us, we’ll call you.

But he reiterated his desire “to assure the American public that we are on it.”

This follows a news briefing last week by “federal agencies leading the response” that, as CNN described, “left reporters and the public with more questions than answers, as they downplayed but simultaneously legitimized concerns about the reported drones.”

“Mystery Drone sightings all over the Country,” President-Elect Donald Trump stated on Truth Social. “Can this really be happening without our government’s knowledge? I don’t think so! Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!”

Meanwhile, on Friday, an international airport in New Windsor, New York, closed its runways for an hour due to a drone spotted in the area; on Saturday night, Boston Police arrested two men for flying a drone “dangerously close to Logan International Airport,” with a third suspect escaping in a boat and still at large; and, earlier in the week, a Chinese national was arrested leaving the country after having flown a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. 

Is there no one in Washington capable of exerting sane leadership?

Or telling the truth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Destroying What Has Been

Kamala Harris, tweets, riots, bail

Let’s assume that chief executives responsible for major appointments know something about whom they’re appointing.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the Democrat running for vice president, was fine with the appointment of an associate professor “of urban and multicultural education,” Brian Lozenski, to help write the state’s “ethnic studies” standards. Those were supposed to have been released for public comment in August but being kept under wraps.

Lozenski’s left-wing ideas are notorious in Minnesota. For instance, he has advocated overthrowing the United States — not to be replaced by an Elysium of reason and freedom, we can be sure.

Let’s also assume that someone running for president of the United States is familiar with his or her own views and agenda.

One thing we should know about his running mate, the current Vice President Kamala Harris, is that in 2020 she asked people to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” In jail for unpeacefully destroying the property of others. 

A couple of years later, she denied making the appeal . . . but her tweet doing so remained up on the platform and, regardless, had been screenshot.

Commentators sometimes suggest that the future policies of Kamala Harris are mysterious, since she has said or half-said so many different things.

What mystery?

All of her left-wing, socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-First Amendment, anti-Second Amendment statements and actions express her true impulses. All her blarney about how she’s now a big fan of fracking or a gun owner who’d drop any intruder, etc., are attempts to fool voters who’d be appalled by her actual agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom

New York’s Pandemic Orgiast

Varma, Covid, New York, pandemic

“The official in charge of New York City’s pandemic response participated in sex parties and attended a dance party underneath a Wall Street bank during the height of the pandemic,” reports The New York Times, “even as he was instructing New Yorkers to stay home and away from others to stop the spread of Covid-19. He acknowledged his transgressions on Thursday after being caught on hidden camera boasting about his exploits.”

The orgiast’s name is Dr. Jay K. Varma. He served as New York City Hall’s senior public health adviser under Mayor Bill de Blasio from the height of the pandemic panic to May 2021. The camera was hidden by comedian Steven Crowder — of “Louder with Crowder” fame and infamy — who tweeted the video last Thursday.

On the released recordings Dr. Varma says a lot of incriminating things. Bad enough is what others regard as his boast: “I actually was the one who convinced the mayor to make it mandatory,” he says clearly, with the “it” being “the vaccine.” 

He was just as intentional, though, about the orgies he participated in — “to let off steam.” These were not spontaneous events erupting at sedate dinners at his home. The “eight or ten friends” rented a hotel room and bought drugs for the occasion.

If you are at all shocked, the doctor understands. “Yeah,” he says, upon being asked what would have happened had he been found out at the time he was bullying people throughout the city, “it would have been a real embarrassment.”

But more than merely embarrassing. That the public health Covidians were willing to break both letter and spirit of their tyrannical edicts only suggests that the most flagrant orgy was their naked abuse of political power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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